Thursday, July 12, 2007

Summertime and the Living is Queasy

Heck, why have we been spending all that money on NSA wiretaps and cameras when all we really needed to alert us of an impending terror attack is Chertoff’s gut? Wonder if he can also tell when it’s going to rain by the ache in his trick knee?

"We could easily be attacked," Chertoff added.” Easily? I thought we were fighting in Iraq so Al Qaeda couldn’t gain a stronghold from which to attack us again. Looks like, even without a stronghold, Chertoff thinks it’ll still be easy for them to attack us. Don’t know about you, but I bet if we had stayed serious, both eyes focused and determined in Afghanistan, attacking us wouldn’t be so “easily” done today.

Scary old, Chertoff, just wanted to remind us that even in the summertime, we must remember to be very afraid. Fear should never get a day off in America.

Oh wait! Last night we heard this. “U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded al-Qaida has rebuilt its operating capability to a level not seen since just before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,…”

They keep us going with the "What if he's right?" and "What if he's wrong?" guessing game. All we have now is a WTF now? That's the bad thing about using scare tactics, if and when there is a real problem, no one will believe them. What a mess.

I’m sure I’d feel differently if I had lost friends or family on 9/11, but I cannot understand how so many people were so traumatized by it. Maybe it was watching the towers collapse (I was not where I could watch TV.) The reaction seemed completely out of proportion give the millennia worth of savagery and suffering we humans have visited upon each other. And then Dubya started declaring war on terror (not Al-Qaeda) and you were with us or you were with the terrorists. And all the poseurs in Congress, regardless of party (or sex for that matter) began tripping over their genitals to pass The Patriot Act and create the Department of Homeland Security (which sounded then and now like something you’d have in Bulgaria) and the Transportation Security Administration (I am still perplexed about where they found that many otherwise-unoccupied white men,) and nobody, but nobody was suggesting that maybe we out to think some of this stuff through. And what’s been done to make your life safer? The airlines put a lock on the cockpit door and voila, the plane can only be used to kill the passengers on board. That is not a small thing, but that’s it.

And just when it looked like if we could stick with it, trade on our goodwill, expend the necessary treasure and apply some half-assed competent management, we could help build a stable government in Afghanistan and rid the world of Osama and al-Qaeda, Dick Cheney decides that what we really, really need to do is affect regime change in Iraq. And what do we have now? 1. Thirty-six hundred dead service people and their grieving families. 2. Twelve thousand wounded and traumatized service people and the suffering they and their families will do for the next fifty years. 3. God knows how many dead and wounded and terrorized and impoverished Iraqis of whom the dead may be the luckiest. 4. Afghanistan on the quick-step toward the Dark Ages with our NATO allies looking for the exits and the upside that heroin will be getting cheaper. 5. Pakistan, which by the way has nuclear weapons, beginning to look like Afghanistan with running water and cablevision. 6. Hammas running Gaza, Fattah holed up in the West Bank and the prospect of any kind of peaceful accommodation between the Palestinians and the Israelis about as bleak as bleak knows how to be. 7. Thousands and thousands more otherwise-pretty-normal Muslims ready to accept the proposition that they should become martyrs for Allah.

What could we have done wronger? Osama must struggle to believe it is not a dream.

I was jolted awake at 1:08 this morning simultaneously gagging and coughing the mother lode of acid reflux brought on by a deadly but delicious grilled chicken and Swiss po’boy with a copious topping of sun dried tomatoes followed by a seasonal dessert of chilled watermelon. I can assure you that duct tape offers no protection from such an attack. I wish that Osama, Chertoff, Bush and Cheney could be visited nightly by this affliction.

In Australia, Howard the Great Unknown is also using fear to garner support. We are supposed to fear Indonesia, terrorists, unions, the Labor Party (our Democrats), anyone of Middle Eastern or Asian appearance, people whose breath smells, people who wear funny clothes or who don't go to Church on Sunday, etc.

The world has never been a safe place and it never will. If you live in fear, you're a fool. You'd better live in a state of awareness tho, because not counting the 12,000 murders we inflict upon ourselves each year, there really ARE people who want you dead because you are different from them.

The Fear Machine is perfect because it always does its job. When nothing is actually happening to instill fear, find a way to ramp it up. When something finally does happen to reinforce the already-instilled fear, the Machine can tell us that it told us so.

Enter the feedback loop and enjoy. The water's fine. The Kool-Aid's even better.

...Or you could just refuse to listen to the Fear Machine's drivel. I rather like option 2, and wish the United Sheep of America would do the same.

Chertoff is a tool, just like everybody else in this crooked-ass administration. They're parodies at this point - albeit crazy and dangerous parodies.

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." - Nietsche

What keeps me from losing my sanity or blowing a gasket when I read of more BS coming out of the Bu$h cartel's mouths is finding all the funny anti bush sites(build a better bush, dancing bush, give bush a brain game, etc) and have fun to my heart's content